4.

 What action did the Roman pope take in 800 that would result in political conflict in the Roman world?

            In an action that was to become the greatest source of political and cultural alienation between the East and West, the pope crowned the king of the Franks, Charlemagne, as emperor in 800. The Eastern Empire, in its adhering to the principle of imperial unity, could only regard Charlemagne as an intruder and the pope's coronation of him as an act of schism within the empire. Even many of Charlemagne's contemporaries in the West saw him as a usurper, for the legitimate Roman Empire in Constantinople had not ceased to exist, nor had it ever given up its claim to rule the entire Christian world. The Eastern emperor therefore refused the political recognition that Charlemagne sought from him. Charlemagne, in his turn, sought to establish his own legitimacy by trying to ruin the legitimacy of Constantinople's claim to universal jurisdiction by accusing the East of heresy: he charged the East with falling into idolatry because of its veneration of icons. He further accused the East of dropping the word filioque (Latin for and from the Son) from the Nicene Creed, even though the word was a Western innovation and never was a part of the Creed as it was formed by the First and Second Ecumenical Councils.

            From the outset, there was a marked antipathy towards things Greek in the court of the new, so-called Holy Roman Empire. The hostility and defiance of the new empire towards Constantinople soon extended beyond the political field and into the cultural realm: literati in Charlemagne's court sought to create a new Christian civilization not patterned after Byzantium. (Even the term Byzantine was given first by the Franks in a derisive sense and with the idea of regarding themselves as the successors of the Romans). The Byzantines, for their part, dismissed all Franks as barbarians and refused to take Western learning seriously. The schism between the two civilizations had thus become firmly fixed.